Kayak Fishing: A Handful of Basic Skills, Including Sweep Strokes, Brace Strokes and Rolling

Adapt Fishing Skills to a Sea Kayak and Become Better at Both

My presence fishing on the water the next day, I knew, would attract attention, much of it skeptical, from the fishermen who'd quiz me about the stability of my kayak, a wooden handbuilt keeled and angular in the hard-chined, Greenland style.

So: How well-suited are seakayaks to saltwater fishing, anyhow?

In two words: Very well.

When you consider that these fast and able boats were first developed for hunting and taking seals, a mammal which outweighs by at least several hundredfold even the largest fish caught by most recreational anglers, you have squarely hit right on the head the "why" of "very well".

The Inuit paddled frigid, challenging waters in these narrow and low-slung boats, and never had the option of flipping on a motor. Yet they landed quarry far bigger, and far more obstreperous, than the typical three to twenty five-pound fish most kayak anglers take in New England waters, doing so with a formidable combination of skill, experience, stealth.

Saltwater fishing from a seakayak can teach seakayaker and angler alike a host of valuable skills, then sharpen and refine those skills apace.

Chasing a breaking school of feeding bluefish for example. You quickly discover whether whether you have a fast and efficient paddle stroke. Working to spin, turn, brace, and reverse kayak to keep up with that fast-moving school --- indicated by splashing and the headlong plunge of terns and gannets --- requires honed reverse sweep forward sweep, bracing and drawstroke skills. , forward brace, reverse stroke, and draw skills....if only because you can't abide not staying with that moving school.

Another skill fishing seakayakers learn is how to read charts closely: to scan their wealth of data for eddies, tidal rips, and current chutes, to assess shallows, gullies, humps, boulders, rockpiles, ridges and trenches for what anglers call structure.

Identifying such areas on a chart takes considerable sit-at-the-kitchen-table, pore-over-the-chart-skills; navigating to those structures requires good navigation skills.